Bandbox (33 page)

He and Arinopoulos didn’t again let their prize out of the trunk until they were twenty miles from Los Angeles, at which point John was permitted to ride up front with Max, who told him that for the foreseeable future his name was Shep. “Kid,” he added, after hearing the circumstances of the penthouse snatch, “I hope you really
have
noticed
everything
. ’Cause I’ve got to write one sensational slam-bang story.”

Three days later, for the first time in more than a week, the Wood Chipper used the key to Paulie’s old desk drawer, though he wondered why he even made the effort. So far as he could see, Montgomery had made zero progress in exposing the big fraud, while Stanwick, AWOL for the last week, had before that just gone through the motions of trying to “find” the little Hoosier, telling everybody about his trips to Indiana and the Jersey City morgue, but never coming up with anything. He’d probably, Chip figured, gone off to work on one of his novels while Harris and the rest of them kept up the hoax until they decided it was time to produce the pipsqueak. For all the reward he’d gotten so far, Chip wished that the little rube
had
been snatched, and maybe ground up in some cement plant.

He gave the desk drawer a vicious little yank and for the first time, to his surprise, found something in it. Two items, actually. The first was a telegram from Houlihan to Max, sent from the Hotel Roosevelt in Hollywood; the second was some tearsheets out of
Manse
—a long-ago spread on Oldcastle’s New Mexico ranch.

Wait a minute. How far was that from Los Angeles? Not very, Chip thought, his heart going like it had the day he heard Betty Divine say “publicity stunt.” If this “shipshape” Shep was “resting” and “restrained” on a ranch, like the telegram said, you could bet it was on the one belonging to the publisher. That’s where the kid had been all along, biding everyone’s time in voluntary luxury. This thing went all the way to the top!

Excitement so banished surliness that Chip considered just saying the hell with Jimmy and marching this incriminating haul over to the
Daily News
. But what would that bring him besides a single
day’s fame? He needed to think long-term. And yet, he couldn’t bring himself to run the items upstairs. He jammed them into his pockets instead. Tonight he’d pound the pavement, thinking. And then he’d sleep on it.

That same afternoon Spilkes sat in Harris’s office, proudly relating the details of his visit, the day before, to AT&T’s headquarters on Broadway, where one of his old pals had invited him to a demonstration of the first telephone link between New York and Paris.

“Pershing talked to the president,” said Spilkes.

“Coolidge was there?” asked Harris.

“Not him. Gifford. AT&T’s president. Pershing was in Paris.” The m.e. tapped the copy of the
New York Times
on Harris’s desk.

The editor-in-chief was not impressed. “Have you been keeping track of the phone bills around
here
, Norman? Before he went on the lam, Stanwick was calling fortune-tellers, coroners, and traveling circuses from Kokomo to Cucamonga. With no result. And Houlihan was running a tab of calls to his imaginary girlfriend out in California. Well,
she’s
now overdue, and everybody else, along with Newman, has disappeared. The way Jimmy’s luck is running, there’ll be a Nairobi edition of
Cutaway
in another two weeks. And one of us will be editing it.”

“What about Rosemary?”

Harris was about to express a lack of faith in even that one supposed bright spot—Nan’s assurances still struck him as too vague to be true—when the steep soundwaves of Hazel’s voice came through the open door.

“Hey, how are ya?” she was shouting from coast to coast. “We’d given up on you.” Short pause. “I must say you don’t
sound
plastered. Hold the line, I’ll get him.
It’s Mr. Houlihan!
”

“Not interested!” cried Harris.

Hazel communicated this to Cuddles before resuming private conversation with him.

“See what I mean?” Harris asked his managing editor. “This is how they run up the bill here.”

“Mr. Spilkes?” called Hazel. “Will
you
talk to him?”

Made curious by what seemed to be Houlihan’s own insistence, Spilkes picked up Harris’s telephone.

“We’re making tracks,” said Cuddles in his familiar murmur. “Gotten as far as Chicago already. So be ready for us when the
Twentieth Century
gets in. Tomorrow morning. Nine-thirty.”

Spilkes transmitted this news to Harris, who responded: “He wants us to watch him walk down the red carpet after he’s been on a cross-country binge?” He said it loud enough that there was no need for the m.e. to repeat it.

“Actually,” said Cuddles, “my companions and I would appreciate something like the opposite of fanfare for the special guest we’re bringing with us. If you can arrange a hood for him, that’d be good.”

“I’m going to give you to Joe,” said Spilkes.

Taking the telephone, Harris could feel the words rising to his lips at last: “Houlihan, you’re fi—”

“Aboard is my Shepard,” said Cuddles. “I shall not want.”

Harris was silent.

“Nine-thirty,” said Cuddles. “And you’d better have a place to stash him.”

At ten o’clock that night the
Twentieth Century
rolled east through Ohio. John Shepard had an upper berth, complete with a radio, all to himself, and he was listening to the Dodge Brothers’ nationwide variety hour: John Barrymore reciting Hamlet’s soliloquy; Dolores Del
Rio singing a Spanish song; Charlie Chaplin telling Pat-and-Mike stories in an Irish accent. Put it all together and it was like listening to a magazine!

Earlier, in the dining car, John had paid more attention to the glamour all around him than to Mr. Houlihan’s explanation of what had happened to him these past couple of months. Supper had been a feast, more food and heavier cutlery than you got at Grandma Chilton’s on Thanksgiving. And they’d let him have a cocktail, even if near-beer had started so much of the trouble that night at Mr. Oldcastle’s penthouse. John had forgotten all about his recent terrors, not to mention the one piece of corroborative evidence he’d managed to hide in his pocket against the faint hope of a rescue like this. Everyone in the dining car had sung “When That Midnight Choo-Choo Leaves for Alabam’ ”—twice, in fact, even though Mr. Ariwhatsisname’s odd way of hitting some of the words threw people’s rhythm off. Over dessert, John had asked if he could call his mother and pa as soon as they all got to New York, and the answer was yes, so long as they could keep a secret.

The Negro porter woke him at seven in the morning to ask if he wanted a shave before they got to New York. The hot towel was still across his face when Mr. Stanwick came up to the barber’s chair with a fedora he’d bought in Chicago and asked him to try it on.

“Pull it tight, kid. Better bury the whole brow.”

Which is what he did when the train pulled into Grand Central and they all rushed down the concourse to the Graybar Building. He knew they must be passing under those ceiling paintings of airships and locomotives, but he kept his eyes on the ground, as he’d been told to. Once inside the building, Mr. Houlihan, Miss Walter, and the photographer were allowed to take the elevator, but Mr. Stanwick asked him if he could manage all the flights of stairs up to fourteen. They didn’t want anybody seeing him in one of the cars.

“Silent as a soundproofed sarcophagus, sí?” said Mr. Stanwick as
they climbed the stairs together. Unsure of what he meant, John nodded. And at the tenth floor he took off the fedora, because he was beginning to sweat.

At that moment, Paul Montgomery, coming down the stairs between eighteen and fourteen, was surprised to hear noise from below. Without letting himself be seen, he decided to halt until he could recognize who was coming up. Paulie was in the stairwell because, five minutes before, the Wood Chipper had called with the news that he’d better take the stairs to the rear door on fourteen if he wanted to see all the proof of a hoax that he’d ever need. “I’ll come out to the landing as soon as you knock,” said Chip, who had gotten over his own Hamlet-like indecision about the telegram and clipping.

Paulie, who’d come up dry in his own investigations, had developed enough doubts about Chip Brzezinski to start thinking that Shep, who was now called that even at
Cutaway
, might really
be
missing. But those doubts vanished as he looked down and saw, through two iron rods of the banister, the ascending figures of Max Stanwick and John Shepard.

“Won’t be long now,” he could hear the older man saying, not much above a whisper, to the boy. “Fame and fortune are fixed on fourteen, friend.”

During the first week of April, the papers were full of news about an apocalyptic collision, in some distant reach of the galaxy, between Nova Pictoris and another star. And as
Bandbox
prepared its Shep story and waited for some sort of counter-strike by
Cutaway
,
a feeling prevailed that the universe was no longer big enough for both of them.

John Shepard, comfortably sequestered in a room at the Commodore, squeezed his memory during long sessions with Max, who pressed for any vivid detail of his cross-country detention, while Hazel squiggled every one of John’s utterances onto her steno pad. Over in the Graybar, illustration and layout of this captivity narrative proceeded under conditions of strict secrecy: the door to the back stairwell was now locked, and Mrs. Zimmerman had received instructions not to let anyone past Reception without an escort.

Since returning to New York, Cuddles and Becky had barely left the building. Even on Sunday afternoon, April 1, when Daniel had wanted her to go with him to a St. Cecilia’s Society concert, Becky had stayed here, working on the Hays Office piece. Monday then brought an amazing encounter with Rosemary LaRoche up at the Plaza. She’d been sweetness itself! She might have been lured back to New York by Becky’s dangling of Stuart Newman, but some team of pixies seemed to have transformed her disposition en route. She’d offered Becky chocolates and tea, and put forth a version of her life story that, if almost certainly false, was still full of usable material, especially if Daisy, lenient in these matters, did the fact-checking. When Becky asked Blanche’s question about the star’s having extra’d on
The Warrens of Virginia
in ’15, Miss LaRoche stayed nice as pie (“Blanche is mistaken, I’m afraid”); and when she questioned the actress as to why she’d left the set of
Wyoming Wilderness
, Rosemary insisted it was only “so I can be at your disposal.” The sole subject that made her bristle was Stuart Newman, whose accidental mention by Becky made Miss LaRoche ask
“Who?”
in a voice two registers lower than the rest of her conversation.

On Wednesday, in his office not far from Becky’s, David Fine tried to hide his disappointment over not being involved in the high-stakes Shep piece. He paraded Joseph Siclari, the 112-pound flyweight
Golden Gloves champ, before the rest of the staffers, and regaled them with predictions of how timely his Williamsburg-versus-Williamsburg piece would be, what with all the Ford and Rockefeller money now pouring into the Colonial restoration down there. Fine then canvassed everybody on whether or not they thought there’d be a good “Groaning Board” column in this vegetarian hotel somebody was opening up in Atlantic City. Maybe he should take Case down there?

Allen was too depressed to react to the suggestion. By Wednesday morning three days had passed since Arinopoulos was supposed to stop paying for the care of the animals out in Queens. Nothing could cheer Allen up, not even Mr. Merrill’s new pencil drawing of Canberra (cavorting among some Aborigines) or his invitation to lunch with some of the old illustrators in the Beaux Arts Building.

There was no talk on the floor of Paul Montgomery, though now that his piece on Ty Cobb had been killed, Fine was pitching a baseball profile of his own: something on Eddie Bennett, the Yankees’ little mascot, whose humped back got touched for good luck by every player heading to the batter’s box. Sidney Bruck, whose fumble of the fiction contest had not been forgotten amidst
Bandbox
’s more pressing troubles, made no direct objection, though he thought this exactly the kind of tasteless piece that would put the magazine into an eccentric dotage. Behind his now-always-closed door, Sidney was still trying to get Ring Lardner to write about Waite Hoyt, a ballplayer so civilized he could also paint pictures and compose fiction.

Individual anxieties were reaching a zenith. Daisy, happy to have helped Cuddles and Max, tried not to imagine the consequences to herself, but she did fret over how the information she’d supplied, traced back to its source, might kill the messenger. And the messenger was, she’d decided, not such a bad fellow. (She’d seen him twice more.)

Nan, whose pencil holder now contained cuttings of palm that she’d gotten at church this past Sunday, continued, for all her success
with Rosemary, to worry about having tricked Waldo Lindstrom, whose only payoff so far had been Nan’s sending his son one of the autographed Eddie Bennett baseballs that David Fine had in his office. Tense over this and Stuart, she flipped through the newspaper as she drank her coffee, dodging the avalanche of advertised remedies against dandruff, constipation, cough, rupture, cramps, weak blood, sore gums, coated tongue, and gas. Burn and Harris had tried to keep these unappetizing products out of
Bandbox
—who wanted the wheezing and the ruptured among one’s readers?—but if the magazine survived the current crisis in some badly wounded state, Nan supposed they’d have to start running notices for this stuff in the back of the book. Editors like Sidney would have to get used to a little less class and a little more mass.

Nan had been seeing such ads all her life, but the current run of them was different from the depressing displays that used to fill the papers during her childhood before the war. Back then each remedy promised the purchaser only enough relief that he could rejoin, for one more day, the losing battle of life. Today the touted elixirs seemed intent not only on alleviating the targeted malady but—more important—on masking the affliction from everyone who might discover the sufferer’s breath to be as imperfect as his knowledge of current events or the turkey trot.